Nick Roberts

Dr. Stephen Haslam

English 1010

January 13 2021

For my Civics Engagement Project, I decided to ask the question on whether or

not beautiful people have an advantage in life. I did lots of research on the topic and

found lots of different experiments and research projects that have been done on the

topic. Our focus of the project was to find the answer to our question and to bring to light

the idea of not being biased towards people because of their looks. I also wrote a flash

narrative as one of my projects. My story was a personal story that has a lot of meaning

to me in my life. It is a story that has defined who I am as a person and shows a lot

about me. Choosing to write a personal story has made me much more grateful for the

things that I have in my life. For my last project, I did a rhetorical analysis on “Marie

Kondo and the Privilege of Clutter” by Arielle Bernstein. The focus of my rhetorical

analysis was to review the chosen article. I picked this article because it seemed

interesting to me. I had heard about the T.V. show that it was about on Netflix and it

made me interested in it. I learned to appreciate the topic that the article was about and

became more interested in it from doing the analysis.

While finding my idea for my civics engagement project I chose to use one of the

examples that was given to us. We chose to ask the question of whether or not beautiful

people have an advantage in life. I worked with Austin on my civics engagement project

and the main struggle that we had was what we were going to do as our actual project.
We finally decided to do a video and decided that our humor would be the main part of

our project to keep it interesting. We chose to do most of our videos in one take to keep

it funny as long as there weren’t too many mistakes. After putting it all together we

found that it was a struggle to turn it in because of the size of the video. We were able

to put together our presentation slideshow on time but we weren’t expecting to be the

first ones presenting so it didn’t go as smoothly as we had hoped.

For my flash narrative, I chose to write a personal story that was true about me. It

is something that has defined me as a person and has changed my life. I’m not very

good at writing stories that include characters talking and having conversations with

each other. I had a hard time putting my essay together but because of the peer

reviews, I was able to make my essay better to the point where it was good enough to

turn in. For my revision of my flash narrative, I chose to change the perspective of who

the story was coming from. My mom was who I changed the storyteller to because she

was also a big part of my story.

In my last project, my rhetorical analysis, I chose to do an analysis on one of the

options that were given to us. I did my rhetorical analysis on “Marie Kondo and the

Privilege of Clutter” by Arielle Bernstein. I thought it would be an interesting article to

analyze because I find that I am a messy person and I could maybe learn from the

article. I had a hard time understanding the article at first because the author was

writing about her personal experience using the method rather than talking about the

method itself. Once I understood that article I was able to write my essay and get

everything done for it. For my revision, I decided to change my essay to a slideshow. I

was able to include all the information I needed without keeping it as wordy as before.
 In conclusion, I am very happy with how my works have changed throughout the

semester. I feel as though my writing has improved with the different works that we

have done. I feel as though with my skills that I now have I will be able to use them in

college to be able to write different essays that I need to. I feel that if I have a job that

requires me to write a lot I will be able to use the skills that I have learned in my future

career.